Reheating with a composite Higgs boson

Abstract

The flatness of the inflaton potential and lightness of the Higgs boson could have the common origin of the breaking of a global symmetry. This scenario provides a unified framework of Goldstone inflation and composite Higgs models, where the inflaton and the Higgs particle both have a pseudoGoldstone boson nature. The inflaton reheats the Universe via decays to the Higgs and subsequent secondzary production of other SM particles via the top and massive vector bosons. We find that inflationary predictions and perturbative reheating conditions are consistent with cosmic microwave background data for sub-Planckian values of the fields, as well as opening up the possibility of inflation at the TeV scale. We explore this exciting possibility, leading to an interplay between collider data cosmological constraints.

Stability, reheating, and leptogenesis

“…As for the inflationary portion of our model in 2.1, our results apply in principle to any inflationary potential that is approximately quadratic near V = 0. Besides chaotic inflation, this includes, for example, models in which the inflaton is a pseudo-Goldstone boson [36][37][38], and alpha-attractor potentials [39,40]. In these models, a symmetry protects the flatness of the potential, such that quantum corrections do not spoil slow roll.…”

Composite Higgs Models after Run 2

“…The amount of tuning present in such a model was analysed in [39]. This coset was also investigated in a cosmological setting in [34,40], where the singlet η plays the role of the inflaton. In such a scenario the size of the singlet VEV has important implications for the scale of inflation, and the mass-mixing of the inflaton would be important also for the process of reheating.…”

Probing $$\textit{CP}$$-violating Higgs and gauge-boson couplings in the Standard Model effective field theory

“…(2) can also be generated in compositeness models including composite scalars [55,56]. Depending on the vacuum structure [57], the C P symmetry can be spontaneously broken and yield to CPV EFT operators once the heavy scalars are integrated out [58,59].…”